María de las Mercedes of Bourbon-Two Sicilies

Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Vendôme, was a French prince of the blood and the father of Henry IV, the first Bourbon king of France. Born at La Fère in Picardy in 1518, he was the senior male descendant of Robert, Count of Clermont, a younger son of Louis IX, which placed his branch of the Capetian house close to the French succession. His marriage in 1548 to Jeanne d'Albret, heiress and later queen regnant of Navarre, made him king consort of Navarre from 1555 and joined the Bourbon name to a sovereign crown. He moved between the Catholic and Protestant camps during the French Wars of Religion and served as lieutenant general of the kingdom in the year before his death in 1562.

Henry IV was the first Bourbon king of France, reigning from 1589 to 1610, and is the figure from whom every later French and Spanish Bourbon descends. Born at Pau in 1553 to Antoine de Bourbon and Jeanne d'Albret, he became King of Navarre in 1572 and leader of the Huguenot cause in the French Wars of Religion. When the Valois line ended with Henry III in 1589 he was the senior Capetian heir, but as a Protestant he had to fight for his kingdom and finally entered Paris after converting to Catholicism in 1593. His Edict of Nantes of 1598 granted French Protestants legal toleration and ended nearly forty years of civil war. With his second wife, Marie de' Medici, he fathered Louis XIII. He died in Paris in 1610.

Louis XIII was King of France and Navarre from 1610 to 1643, the eldest son of Henry IV and Marie de' Medici. He came to the throne as a boy of eight under his mother's regency and asserted his own authority in 1617. From 1624 he governed with Cardinal Richelieu as his chief minister, a partnership that broke the political and military independence of the Huguenots at the siege of La Rochelle, curbed the power of the great nobles, and brought France into the Thirty Years' War against the Habsburgs of Spain and Austria. His marriage to Anne of Austria produced two sons after more than twenty years without an heir: the future Louis XIV and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, founder of the Orléans branch.

Louis XIV, known as the Sun King, reigned as King of France and Navarre from 1643 to 1715, a span of seventy-two years that remains the longest documented reign of any European sovereign. The son of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, he succeeded at the age of four, took personal control of government on Mazarin's death in 1661, and ruled thereafter without a first minister. He made the court at Versailles the centre of French political and cultural life, backed the arts and the sciences through royal academies, revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and fought a long series of wars that left France dominant but exhausted. His marriage to Maria Theresa of Spain produced the Grand Dauphin, and his grandson Philip took the Spanish throne in 1700.

Louis, known as the Grand Dauphin and addressed at court simply as Monseigneur, was the eldest son of Louis XIV and Maria Theresa of Spain and heir to the French throne for almost fifty years without ever reigning. Born at Fontainebleau in 1661, he was educated under the historian Bossuet, commanded French forces in the Rhineland campaign of 1688, and otherwise lived apart from government at his château of Meudon, where he assembled a notable art collection. His marriage to Maria Anna Victoria of Bavaria produced three sons: Louis, Duke of Burgundy, Philip, who became Philip V of Spain, and Charles, Duke of Berry. He died at Meudon in 1711, four years before his father.

Louis, Duke of Burgundy, was the eldest son of the Grand Dauphin and the grandson of Louis XIV, and was heir to the French throne for the last year of his life. Born at Versailles in 1682, he was educated by the archbishop and writer Fénelon, who turned a hot-tempered boy into a serious and devout prince with reforming ideas about kingship and the burden of war on the French people. He commanded in Flanders during the War of the Spanish Succession and became Dauphin on his father's death in 1711. His marriage to Marie Adélaïde of Savoy produced the future Louis XV. He died at Marly in February 1712, only days after his wife, leaving his young son as heir to his great-grandfather.

Louis I was King of Spain for seven months in 1724 and remains the shortest reigning monarch in Spanish history. Born in Madrid in 1707, he was the eldest son of Philip V and Maria Luisa of Savoy and the first Spanish born member of the Bourbon dynasty. He was created Prince of Asturias as heir to the throne and married Louise Élisabeth d'Orléans, a daughter of the Regent of France, in 1722. His father abdicated in his favour in January 1724, apparently intending to retire from public life, and the young king took over a government still largely run by his father's ministers. He died in Madrid in August 1724, and Philip V resumed the crown.

Louis, Dauphin of France, was the only surviving son of Louis XV and Marie Leszczyńska and the father of three kings, yet he never reigned himself. Born at Versailles in 1729, his birth secured the direct succession and was greeted with public rejoicing. He was pious, studious and associated with the devout party at court, and he was largely kept away from government by his father. His first wife, Maria Teresa Rafaela of Spain, died young; his second marriage, to Maria Josepha of Saxony, produced Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X, who between them occupied the French throne for all but three of the years from 1774 to 1830. He died at Fontainebleau in 1765, nine years before his father.

Louis XVI was the last king of France of the old regime, reigning from 1774 until the monarchy was abolished in 1792. Born at Versailles in 1754, a grandson of Louis XV, he came to the throne at nineteen and married the Austrian archduchess Marie Antoinette. He supported the American colonies against Britain, backed attempts at fiscal and administrative reform, and abolished serfdom on the royal domain, but the crown's debts forced him to summon the Estates General in 1789, opening the French Revolution. He accepted the constitutional monarchy of 1791, was suspended after the storming of the Tuileries in August 1792, and was tried by the National Convention. He died in Paris in January 1793.

Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême, was the elder son of Charles X and the last Dauphin of France. Born at Versailles in 1775, he spent his youth in emigration and in 1799 married his first cousin Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, the surviving daughter of Louis XVI, a match intended to reunite the senior royal line. He returned to France in 1814 and in 1823 commanded the French army that marched into Spain to restore the authority of Ferdinand VII. He became Dauphin when his father took the throne in 1824. During the July Revolution of 1830 he signed an act of abdication minutes after his father's, so that legitimists counted him as Louis XIX for a matter of moments. He died at Gorizia in 1844.

Henri, Count of Chambord, was the posthumous son of Charles Ferdinand, Duke of Berry, and the last direct male heir of the senior French Bourbon line. Born in Paris in 1820, he was hailed by royalists as the child of miracle because his birth came after his father's death and secured the succession. Charles X abdicated in his favour in 1830, and legitimists thereafter recognised him as Henry V, though he never reigned and spent his life abroad, chiefly at Frohsdorf in Austria. In 1873, with a monarchist majority in the National Assembly, he came close to being placed on a restored throne, but he refused to abandon the white flag of the Bourbons for the tricolour and the plan collapsed. He died childless in 1883.